30 



SCIENCE. 



[N. 3. Vol. VIII. No. 184. 



But when we consider the collecting in- 

 stinct of man, something primordially al- 

 lied to the gathering habits of a squirrel 

 or a pack-rat, the chromatic eccentricity of 

 an oriole or a bower-bird, or the vandalism 

 of a shrike or a racoon, we may anticipate 

 that, unregulated, it can produce the most 

 fantastic and inane combinations of objects. 

 And it does. The comment of a German 

 writer, Wilhelm Biirger, on the misleading 

 collections of the art museums of his own 

 country should be profitably quoted. He 

 says : " Our museums are the veritable 

 graveyards of art, in which have been 

 heaped up, with a tumulous-like promis- 

 cuousness, the remains of which have been 

 carried thither. A Venus is placed side 

 by side with a Madonna, a satyr next to a 

 saint. Luther is in close proximity to a 

 Pope, a painting of a lady's chamber next 

 to that of a church. Pieces executed for 

 churches, palaces, city halls, for a particu- 

 lar edifice, to teach some moral or historic 

 truth, designed for some especial light, for 

 some well studied surrounding, all are hung 

 pellmell upon the walls of some non com- 

 mittal gallery — a kind of posthumous 

 asylum, where a people no longer capable 

 of producing works of art come to admire 

 this magnificent gallery of debris." 



But these mere failures of perception, 

 these obvious incongruities of place, time 

 and concept, are less detestable certainly 

 than the ceaseless association of things 

 which have no conceivable relations. To 

 use a word thrown now into organized 

 speech by the peculiarities of certain lit- 

 erary productions of our day, there is a 

 latent ' yellowness' in men which can be 

 insidiously evoked to some sort of response, 

 and there is a phase of attention which 

 emits, as it were, a reflected gleam of 

 puerile pleasure, when a museum cabinet 

 summons its notice to the skull of a mnr- 

 derer at rest along side of a brick from the 

 Great "Wall of China, the tooth of a shark 



inoflfensively placed in juxtaposition with 

 the thighbone of the diver whose fate it 

 determined, or the jaw of a gorilla by the. 

 side of William Tell's arrow, if not a wax 

 model of the original pippin it so luckily 

 transfixed. 



These are not purely aggravatedly im- 

 agined cases, devised for your amusement. 

 The provincial museums of England, for 

 instance, were long a scandal. Poorly sup- 

 ported, absurdly arranged, without dis- 

 criminating curators, they became mixtures 

 of oddities, monstrosities and perversions. 

 Listen to this well-informed and well- 

 weighed recital from the lips of W. Boyd 

 Dawkins : "In one instance which occurs 

 to me you see a huge plaster cast of a 

 heathen divinity surrounded by fossils, 

 stufifed crocodiles, minerals and models of 

 various articles, such as Chinese junks. In 

 another a museum unit takes the form of a 

 glass case containing a fragment of human 

 skull and a piece of oatcake labeled ' frag- 

 ment of human skull very much like a 

 piece of oatcake.' In a third wax models 

 are exhibited of a pound weight of veal, 

 pork and mutton-chops, cod-fish, turnips, 

 potatoes, carrots and parsnips, which must 

 have cost the value of the originals many 

 times over, with labels explaining their 

 chemical constitution, and how much flesh 

 and fat they will make. * * * * In very 

 many museums art is not separated from 

 natural history, nor from ethnology, and 

 the eye of the beholder takes in at a glance 

 the picture of a local worthy, a big fossil, a 

 few cups and saucers, a piece of cloth from 

 the South Seas, a war club or two, and very 

 possibly a mummy." As an American ana- 

 logue some of us may recall the Athenaeum 

 in Nantucket town with its museum of 

 mingled odds and ends, models, whale 

 jaws, implements, antiquities and dirt, 

 though there our literary intuitions ap- 

 preciate its extreme availability for the pen 

 of Miss Wilkins or Sarah Orne Jewett. 



